Ah, the holidays: The time to go back and catch up on video games you're kicking yourself for having missed. (Also family/togetherness/having trees inside the house, but the video game thing is paramount.) For me, that typically means murder, and more specifically in 2024, a sequel to one of my favorite detective games of the last few years, one I'd been putting off since it came out last month: The Rise Of The Golden Idol.
Rise, like 2022's Case Of The Golden Idol, takes the deduction-based challenges of Lucas Pope's utterly brilliant Return Of The Obra Dinn—giving you, the player, a snapshot of a single moment in time, and asking you to figure out what the hell happened to cause all these people to be shouting/killing each other/on fire—and breaking it into bite-sized chunks. Studio Color Gray Games has built on its earlier success, though, by updating the formula with both a fascinating new look, and more involved and complicated mysteries that thread the needle between detail work and wider inferences and deductions. The art style of the original game was already one of Case's big selling points, taking slightly pixelated visuals and using them to create human characters with uniquely grotesque features. Rise builds on that success by switching to a more cartoonish look, while also incorporating more animation into the character portraits; not only does the upgraded appearance allow Color Gray to hide more information in each panel, but the jittery, twitchy faces of your various murderers and victims make each of them come off as a very specific sort of gross.
The gameplay, meanwhile, continues to ably guide the player toward making the big logical leaps without too much hand-holding. True, it can occasionally feel—especially if you binge the game, as I did while half-dozing off the Christmas ham and mashed potatoes—like you're simply doing a more complicated version of middle school reading comprehension exercises, slotting familiar names into various blanks. But when the game makes you actually tax yourself (which it does on more than one occasion, notably in a truly excellent chapter that forces you to match identities to each member of an apartment complex where a mysterious death has just taken place) it pulls that incredible detective game trick of making you follow your instincts to the clues you know must be hiding there. Finding one of these smoking guns is an incredibly satisfying feeling, and Rise is an excellent machine for producing epiphanies in a player's brain.
At the same time, Rise's wider storytelling shows its developers have upped their game since Case (building on the interesting work in spanning long-form narratives that appeared in that game's two follow-up DLCs). Moving the action from the 1700s and 1800s to an alternate universe 1970s awash in paranoia, the game bounces backwards and forwards in time to build expectations, plant seeds of future plot ideas, and slowly clue you in on how much horrifically dangerous the series' titular magical artifact can be when interfacing with "modern" technology. Broken into multi-part chapters, each individual case concerns itself with smaller details, while also building into that much more disturbing narrative, allowing the horror to build even as you keep watching people get themselves killed in (frequently ridiculous) ways. Through it all, the story sticks to the games' overall thesis that there's no sinister master plan for humanity that won't get stuck in the weeds the minute it gets within arms reach of actual people—a sort of "optimism through stupidity" philosophy that feels charmingly specific.
The Rise Of The Golden Idol was, in other words, exactly what I needed to work off the post-presents high: A quiet, more reflective gaming experience that still had plenty of laughs and shocks along the way. I wish I'd played it sooner, but, paradoxically, I'm very glad I had it to help me manage the Christmas cooldown like this.
